Thursday, April 29, 2021

 

May Day 2021

Only the Working Class Can Help the Working Class

Focus on Socialism (FOS)

Don Currie, Editor

April 27th 2021


May Day 2021 finds millions of Canadian workers struggling to earn a living in the midst of a global pandemic and economic chaos. Public trust in government and state agencies is falling. Federal and Provincial governments are engaged in blame game politics unable to successfully organise a country-wide mass vaccination campaign.

To provide for families, wage earners are compelled to labour in unsafe conditions in many cases without paid sick leave  and many still unvaccinated. Front line public health care workers, public school teachers, child and senior care workers are working to exhaustion. Mass transit workers, assembly line workers in manufacturing, meatpacking and food processing, Amazon and other retail chain workers, many without union protection, are particularly exposed. All work places are now unsafe.

 The spectre of unemployment is ever present. Statscan labour force numbers record a chronic 8 to 10% (1 to 2 million) unemployed 15 to 65 age demographic and a constant double-digit rate of over 600 thousand youth age 15 to 24. The lack of career opportunities for the latter, durable jobs and socially useful work, dwindles and youth are advised not to expect anything better in the future. They are advised to put off their hopes and equip themselves with a variety of high-tech skills to “remain competitive” in a revolving door capitalist economy. Long term employment is now the preserve of a minority of wealth and privilege.

Youth, forced out of education before attaining skills to survive, are compelled to hold several temporary minimum wage jobs and live communally or with parents to afford rent and food. Young working women and girls, among the lowest paid, are particularly vulnerable to victimization. University students and their families are burdened with staggering student loans and dwindling summer job opportunities to fund the next semester.

Immigrant workers confront discrimination on the job and seasonal farm labour is often forced to live in squalid conditions fearful of complaining to hostile government agencies. Racialized minorities are channeled to the lowest paid and most onerous work. The incidence of criminal violence against Indigenous, First Nations, Black, South Asian, Muslim and Chinese citizens, men, women and youth, is evidence of the growth of fascist racist thuggery encouraged by a constant mass media and on-line hate campaign.

With dedication and self-sacrifice and placing their families needs above their own health, millions of workers in spite of all obstacles, continue to do their jobs.

They do so as the purchasing power of average wages declines as cost-of-living index rises.

Two income families are the norm. The recent federal budget child care plan claims child care costs will be reduced to $10/day in five years. There is no guarantee the plan will be approved. If a federal election takes place this year it may never see the light of day. The plan is already endangered by federal provincial wrangling. What is needed is a universal and free child care plan implemented now.

EI and CERB   programs are erratic with complex wait time and qualification requirements. Government administrators treat applicants as a problem rather than rightful recipients their taxes have paid for to cover family needs in an economic situation they did not create. Right wing politicians and their media cons keep up a constant barrage of 19th century rhetoric reminiscent of R.B. Bennet and the Dirty Thirties when he infamously said; “I wasn’t elected to subsidize idleness”. Such baleful voices today continue to condemn worker support programs while lauding the obscene excesses of the idle rich. 

The Canada Emergency Wage subsidy program (CEW) goes to employers with weak oversite as to whether or not it prevents layoffs. 

US Federal Treasury quantitative easing financialization policies are being adopted in Canada as the Bank of Canada stimulates a flagging stock market with a reported $4 billion/week liquidity injection, fueling the threat of inflation. The results are wild speculative housing bubbles in all major Canadian cities, driving up rents while the Canada Mortgage and Housing Program lies idle, prevented from solving the growing demand for affordable housing.

The concentration and centralization of capital in the hands of a few mega investors having at their disposal investment funds rivaling the GDP of Canada means that vital pipelines, railways and hydro-electric grids are irreversibly established north south to serve US demand for Canadian resources. The result is the gradual de-industrialization of Canada.  

Corporate-owned communication and telecom information networks is reduced to a few mega providers who control the volume and content of a vast cosmopolitan stream of dis-information and do so without public oversight and with power to deny user access. User information gathered is a monopoly controlled saleable commodity. The CTRC is reduced to an arena of struggle between media giants that excludes competition and burdens Canadians with the highest television, internet and cell phone rates in the world.

Capitalist electoral politics and tedious federal-provincial electoral blame-games played masterfully by LIBCON politicians with a buy in from the NDP, the Bloc and the Greens is the stuff and substance of vacuous CBC, CTV and Global celebrity analysts who self-servingly define what they do as the ultimate of freedom of the press and freedom of speech. The struggle to end private ownership and control of communications and media is at the forefront of the struggle for democracy today.

Corporate control of media has given rise to a progressive, anti-imperialist labour and peace internet social alternative that is growing. It is becoming a stronger voice for nuclear disarmament, for upholding the founding principles of the UN, for Canadian withdrawal from NATO and NORAD. It is becoming a stronger voice against US-Canadian government provocations and sanctions against China, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, the DPRK and other US so-called “adversaries”, at last count numbering more than 40.

The rise of an alternative to monopoly-controlled information has alarmed CSIS and CSE who supply MP’s and Parliamentary committees with a constant supply of dire warnings that alternative information is a “threat to our way or life” and should be shut down before it indoctrinates Canadians with the virus of sedition.

Powerful finance capitalist elites, possessing massive capital resources, fund political parties to control governments. Such interests hold controlling interests in corporate mass media platforms to promote the line that monopoly capitalism cares about the lives of wage earners and their families. Capitalist funded think tanks and its academic mercenaries are paid well to cynically appropriate popular people’s slogans and re-mold the message to the service of exploiters. Such interests are masters at playing two-party politics and federal provincial relations as the limit of democratic practice today.

While millions of workers are compelled to work in low paid unskilled occupations others earn wages in more complex and evolving workplaces of skilled labour, science and technology. The Canadian labour force of about 18 million is roughly divided 60% service workers to 40% industrial, manufacturing, transportation and utilities. All are impacted by new technologies.

All passive and simplistic attitudes about the evolving work places of today are harmful to the cause of the working class. Such matters deserve the deepest study by anyone purporting to be consistently proletarian and programs that make workers beneficiaries and not victims of new productive forces.

Likewise, a classless analysis of the social problems that arise from the transition to a carbon neutral economy is dominant among many who believe themselves to be environmentally progressive and has led them to dismissive and simplistic states of mind about the consequences for workers compelled to sell their labour power in the discovery, extraction, processing, storage and delivery of fossil fuel energy. That is not the view of the workers and their unions.

On this May Day, 2021, here and now, all workers, regardless of where they work, organised or unorganised, are forced to sell their labour power wherever there is a demand for it. Their cause is indivisible, all for one and one for all.

Monopoly and its liberal-reformist agencies such as the World Economic Forum align class collaborationist labour lieutenants occupying high office at the ITUC, ILO, AFL-CIO, CLC and their “friends of labour” acolytes who issue statements, slogans and learned tomes advising workers to limit their demands to making the profit system “fair and just.” Such voices assert that capitalism can be managed, profiteers can be persuaded to share a bit more with workers so long as workers agree to abandon organizing economic struggles and abandon class struggle science-based revolutionary struggle with the goal of the overthrowing capitalism and relacing it with socialism.  

Class social antagonisms are reaching a point in Canada where the ruling class is finding it more difficult to rule in the old way and more working people are learning from their own experience that there is no future by continuing to accept things as they are.

A new type of government is needed, a government of peace, people’s economic development and people’s democracy that places labour at the top of the country’s agenda.

Worker’s unity for worker’s needs serves all those who are oppressed.

Safe and free vaccines for everyone

Full employment at living wages without inflation

We Shall Have Peace If We Fight For It!

 

 

 

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